exist, you are a bag of wheat.

Your Caroline, so enticing five hours before in this very chamber
where she frisked about like an eel, is now a junk of lead. Were you
the Tropical Zone in person, astride of the Equator, you could not
melt the ice of this little personified Switzerland that pretends to
be asleep, and who could freeze you from head to foot, if she liked.
Ask her one hundred times what is the matter with her, Switzerland
replies by an ultimatum, like the Diet or the Conference of London.

Nothing is the matter with her: she is tired: she is going to sleep.

The more you insist, the more she erects bastions of ignorance, the
more she isolates herself by chevaux-de-frise. If you get impatient,
Caroline begins to dream! You grumble, you are lost.

Axiom.--Inasmuch as women are always willing and able to explain their
strong points, they leave us to guess at their weak ones.

Caroline will perhaps also condescend to assure you that she does not
feel well. But she laughs in her night-cap when you have fallen
asleep, and hurls imprecations upon your slumbering body.

WOMEN'S LOGIC.

You imagine you have married a creature endowed with reason: you are
woefully mistaken, my friend.

Axiom.--Sensitive beings are not sensible beings.

Sentiment is not argument, reason is not pleasure, and pleasure is
certainly not a reason.

"Oh! sir!" she says.

Reply "Ah! yes! Ah!" You must bring forth this "ah!" from the very
depths of your thoracic cavern, as you rush in a rage from the house,
or return, confounded, to your study.

Why? Now? Who has conquered, killed, overthrown you! Your wife's
logic, which is not the logic of Aristotle, nor that of Ramus, nor
that of Kant, nor that of Condillac, nor that of Robespierre, nor that
of Napoleon: but which partakes of the character of all these logics,
and which we must call the universal logic of women, the logic of
English women as it is that of Italian women, of the women of Normandy
and Brittany (ah, these last are unsurpassed!), of the women of Paris,
in short, that of the women in the moon, if there are women in that
nocturnal land, with which the women of the earth have an evident
understanding, angels that they are!

The discussion began after breakfast. Discussions can never take place
in a household save at this hour. A man could hardly have a discussion
with his wife in bed, even if he wanted to: she has too many
ad